James Woolsey, Hybrid Hawk

Tall and lanky and dressed in a navy sweater, an oxford shirt, jeans, and Top-Siders, the 66-year-old tells me the story of how he, a self-described “Scoop Jackson/Joe Lieberman Democrat” who served as Jimmy Carter’s undersecretary of the Navy and Bill Clinton’s cia director and was known for his support of Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraq War, became an ardent advocate for energy independence.

Like many clean-energy enthusiasts, Woolsey is part geek, part zealot. He’s happy to spend a Saturday morning showing off the three rows of photovoltaic panels on his roof, the meter in his basement that displays when his house is feeding electricity back to the grid, and his white hybrid with a “Bin Laden Hates This Car” bumper sticker. “In two weeks,” he boasts of his next oil-saving upgrade, “my Prius is going to become a plug-in.” He wrote the foreword to 50 Simple Steps to Save the Earth From Global Warming, appeared in Who Killed the Electric Car? and Leonardo DiCaprio’s The 11th Hour, and cofounded a group to wean Americans from foreign oil.

Mother Jones